Vocalizations carry emotional, physiological and individual information. This suggests that
they may serve as potentially useful indicators for inferring animal welfare. At the same time …

In studies of cumulative cultural evolution in non-human animals, the focus is most often on
incremental changes that increase the efficacy of an existing form of socially learned …

Culturally transmitted communication signals–such as human language or bird song–can
change over time through cultural drift, and the resulting dialects may consequently enhance …

Rhythm is a prominent feature of music. Of the infinite possible ways of organizing events in
time, musical rhythms are almost always distributed categorically. Such categories can …

The complex and melodic nature of many birds' songs has raised interest in potential
parallels between avian vocal sequences and human speech. The similarities between …

Songbirds acquire songs by imitation, as humans do speech. Although imitation should
drive convergence within a group and divergence through drift between groups, zebra finch …

Birdsong is a longstanding model system for studying evolution and biodiversity. Here, we
collected and analyzed high quality song recordings from seven species in the family …

Birdsong shows striking parallels with human speech. Previous comparisons between
birdsong and human vocalizations focused on syntax, phonology and phonetics. In this …

Highlights•The expressive power of language depends on both syntax and
compositionality.•We review evidence for compositionality in syntactic combinations of bird …

Biological predispositions in vocal learning have been proposed to underlie commonalities
in vocal sequences, including for speech and birdsong, but cultural propagation could also …